Because Dickens and Dostoyevsky and Woody Guthrie were telling their stories much better than I ever could, I decided to stick to my own mind.
He not busy being born is busy dying.
The best songs are the songs you write that you don’t know anything about. They’re an escape.
Everything’s a business. Love, truth, beauty. Conversation is a business. Spirituality is not a business, so it’s going to go against the grain of people who are trying to exploit other people.
I used to play hockey when I was growing up. Everyone sort of learns how to skate and play hockey at an early age.
I always thought the best kind of sunglasses are the motorcycle helmets with the black plastic masks on them. That way, nobody can recognize the back of your head either.
I used to think it’s better if you just live and die and no one knows who you are.
We don’t see the people that vice destroys. We just see the glamour of it – everywhere we look, from billboard signs to movies, to newspapers, to magazines. We see the destruction of human life.
I think of rock ‘n’ roll as a combination of country blues and swing band music, not Chicago blues, and modern pop.
I come from way north. We’d listen to radio shows all the time. I think I was the last generation, or pretty close to the last one, that grew up without TV.
People’s lives are filled with vice and the trappings of it. Ambition, greed and selfishness all have to do with vice. Sooner or later, you have to see through it or you don’t survive.
Once I went into songwriting, I figured I had to – I couldn’t be a hellfire rock ‘n’ roller. But I could write hellfire lyrics.
We shouldn’t confuse singers and performers with actors. Actors will say, “My character this, and my character that.” Like beating a dead horse. Who cares about the character? Just get up and act. You don’t have to explain it to me.
Once I can focus in on something, I just play it in my mind until an idea comes from out of nowhere, and it’s usually the key to the whole song. It’s the idea that matters. It’s like electricity was around long before Edison harnessed it.
Whenever anybody does something in a big way, it’s always rejected at home and accepted someplace else.
Having hits buries a singer in the past. A lot of singers hide in the past because it’s safer back there. If you’ve ever heard today’s country music, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
People think that singing and playing is easy. It’s not. It’s easy to strum along, but if you actually want to really play, where it’s important, that’s a hard thing and not too many people are good at it.
There are degrees of happiness. You go from one to the other and then back again. It’s hard to be completely happy when those around us are suffering and groaning from hunger.
A lot of people say there is no happiness in this life and certainly there’s no permanent happiness. But self-sufficiency creates happiness.
You have to work out where your place is. And who you are. But we’re all spirit. That’s all we are, we’re just walking dressed up in a suit of skin, and we’re going to leave that behind.
Once you think you know the song, then you have go and see how other people have done it.